You can get a lot of perspective on where we are at in terms of cloud computing and storage if you take a look at a specific domain, such as photography. Not so long ago, I was completely relying on film based cameras. I would take a bunch of photos and get them developed. The whole process was so highly unreliable. If the lighting was bad or the image was blurry - too bad. I wouldn't know until I got the pictures back from Blacks' or some other photo finishing place. Took about an hour to print (at a premium). You also have to buy albums to store your "physical media" - film and photos.

Old school film-based cameras are still around - but getting harder to find (you can still buy disposable cameras that has film in it, some professional photographers still use film, and so forth).

Fast forward to today - my first digital camera was an HP PhotoSmart 735 (not a great camera by any stretch, but did a satisfactory job). I now use a Nikon Coolpix S50C and I've suddenly become a decent amateur photographer. I can preview the photos I take on a nice LCD screen and get instant feedback on the quality of my shots (my style has evolved to iterative, agile photography instead of waterfall).

Once you go into a digital direction, you soon get faced with the problem of massive amounts of data - how do you store and manage it? My preliminary solution was to burn CD-Recordable discs. But again, there is a reliance on physical media. What if the disc has a scratch on it and is unreadable? What if my house burns down? An extreme circumstance - but it can happen.

I solved the problem by moving my photos up on Flickr. Now my entire extended family and friends can access them (in fact, my pics have been viewed over 16,703 times), I can upload them through the website or using a client (Flickr Uploadr). I currently have 2,486 photos online. If you estimate that each photo is approximately 1.44 MB in size, that totals about 3.5 GB of storage. I don't have to worry about storing them on physical media and creating backups in several locations (in case of floods or house fires). I can access them from anywhere - and I can keep my photos up to date very easily. In my household, cloud computing has arrived. My camera even supports wifi and will automatically upload my photos online (although I haven't explored that feature yet).

Live Mesh is looking very promising in providing similar capabilities for the desktop, you can sync up files and access them in an online version of your desktop or on multiple computers. I've been testing it out - it has a wonderful potential to provide the same benefits I'm getting with photos through Flickr. Instead of using USB keys, I'm finding myself using Windows Live SkyDrive more often than not for sharing files.

As a developer, I'm getting quite excited about the prospect of storage and reliability capabilities in my applications. Ubiquitous data rocks - I can create a Web, desktop and mobile application that shares the same data store and membership capabilities. No need to worry about the plumbing involved in synchronizing data across these different application platforms! How has cloud computing affected you?